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Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to borrow product descriptions?

I work for an online retailer that has the opportunity to add a lot of SKUs to our site in a relatively short amount of time by borrowing content from another site (with their permission). There are a lot of positives for us to do this, but one big question we have is what the borrowed content will do to our search rankings (we normally write our own original content in house for a couple thousand SKUs). Organic search traffic brings in a significant chunk of our business and we definitely don't want to do something that would jeopardize our rankings.

Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to use the borrowed product descriptions?

Is there a rule of thumb for what proportion of the site should be original content vs. duplicate content without running into issues with our search rankings?

6 Responses

Duplicate product descriptions are the single most problematic issue ecommerce sites face from an SEO perspective. Not only are most canned descriptions so short as to cause product pages to be considered thin on content, copied/borrowed descriptions are more likely to be spread across countless sites.

While it may seem like an inordinate amount of time/cost, unique quality descriptions that are long enough to truly identify product pages as being worthy will go a long way to proving a site deserves ranking, trust.

You definitely could run in to trouble here. Duplicate content of this type is meant to be dealt with on a page level basis. However if Google think it is manipulative then then it can impact on the domain as a whole. By "think" I really mean "if it matches certain patterns that manipulative sites use" - there is rarely an actual human review.

It is more complex than a simple percentage. Likely many factors are involved. However.. there is a solution!

You can simply add a no index tag to the product pages that have non-original content. That;ll keep them out of the index and keep you on the safe side of dupe issues.

Just adding a point to this (and with reference to the other good points left by others) - Writing good product descriptions isn't actually that expensive!

It always seems it, as they are usually done in big batches. However on a per product basis they are pretty cheap. Do it well and you will not only improve the search results, but you can improve conversions and even make it more linkable.

Pick a product at random. Would it be worth a few £/$ to sell more of that item? If not remove it from the site anyway.

Adding a lot of SKUs to your site in a relatively short amount of time by borrowing content from another site sounds more like a bad sales pitch than a good "opportunity". If you don't want to put in jeopardy a significant chunk of your business, then simply drip the new sku's in as you get new content for them. The thin content's not likely to win you any new search traffic, so unless their addition is going to quickly increase sales from your existing traffic sources and quantities in dramatic fashion, why go down that road?

I have looked at a lot of Panda hit sites and one of the most common issues were e-commerce sites that consisted of primarily of stock product descriptions. Why would Google want to rank a site highly that just contains information that hundreds of other sites have?

If you've got a large chunk of your site containing duplicate descriptions like this then you can attract a Panda flag which can cause your whole site to not rank well, not just the product pages.

You could use the duplicate product descriptions if you had a large amount of original and helpful text around it. However, no one knows what the ratio is. If you have the ability to rewrite the product descriptions this is by far the best thing to do.

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